God I love Bregalad's work, and this just might make this version of BoF1 the definitive way to play BoF1 now.

I agree. For BoF1 I combined Bregalad's sound hack with ThegreatBen's Improved hack (which includes a color restoration). Thus far they seem to play nicely together. I always appreciated the GBA version's improved interface and addition of a dash button, but it still felt rough with the colors and sound messed up. The hacking community helped iron out all the remaining flaws with the port and it's now the definitive version for me. Sounds fantastic now.

I still default to SNES for BoF2 due to the excellent fan retranslation. No offense Bregalad, what I tested of the BoF2 sound hack seems fantastically done as well. But unless someone revives the attempt to retranslate BoF1 on the SNES, the GBA port is now my go-to version with the hacks applied.

It's interesting reading the documents too, that apparently the SNES instruments were actually already inside the rom but were unused and just swapped out with 8bit samples instead. I imagine there was still a lot of work involved, but it sounds like it was a less stressful time than the FF games. Also makes me wonder whether Capcom's other GBA ports (like the Disney Magical Quest trilogy) also have the original music samples contained as well.

It has been a lot of fun witnessing Bregalad demonstrating such an incredible job accurately replicating SPC700 on GBA, and in such high quality. GBA was always shat on by gamers as inferior and incapable of doing this. This notion still persists unfortunately (even Digital Foundry has perpetuated some dishonesty about GBA's capabilities) as most people don't follow the hacking community, but they have provided some great proof to debunk it.

I've always just used the plain color restoration, sound restoration, and text cleanup.

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It's interesting reading the documents too, that apparently the SNES instruments were actually already inside the rom but were unused and just swapped out with 8bit samples instead. I imagine there was still a lot of work involved, but it sounds like it was a less stressful time than the FF games. Also makes me wonder whether Capcom's other GBA ports (like the Disney Magical Quest trilogy) also have the original music samples contained as well

Capcom's ported games actually do great on GBA, but the problem is that those notable for official translations are platformers where the cropped screen results in more offscreen snipers.

Makes you wonder if MMBN's sound team had any work in this porting though, since the games had a good share of a sort of 8-bit.

It's interesting reading the documents too, that apparently the SNES instruments were actually already inside the rom but were unused and just swapped out with 8bit samples instead.

Indeed, but it's not 8-bit samples (all GBA samples are always 8-bit), but GameBoyColor audio used. In addition to Direct Sound, games tend to use Game Boy Color audio for some reason, even though it would be largely unneeded in most cases.

Apparently Capcom arbitrairly limited themselves to 2 simultaneous Direct Sound samples in Breath of Fire I and 3 samples for Breath of Fire II, leaving the rest to GameBoyColor audio or just dropping tracks. This was largely un-necessary, has aving all 8 tracks in Direct Sound works after hacking the IRQ routine a little.

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Also makes me wonder whether Capcom's other GBA ports (like the Disney Magical Quest trilogy) also have the original music samples contained as well.

I don't know Disney Magical Quest so I can't answer, but I can assert Mega Man & Bass doesn't have them.

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It has been a lot of fun witnessing Bregalad demonstrating such an incredible job accurately replicating SPC700 on GBA, and in such high quality. GBA was always shat on by gamers as inferior and incapable of doing this.

Yeah, the GBA can do it just fine technically, even if it requires sometimes throwing some CPU time at the task. Which apparently many developers were afraid of.

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Makes you wonder if MMBN's sound team had any work in this porting though, since the games had a good share of a sort of 8-bit.

I don't know, but MMBN makes a much, much better usage of GameBoyColor sound. Actually it's probably some of the GBA games that uses it the best in my opinion.

Wonderful, I love Breath of Fire 2, excellent story and music, by the way, is possible restore music to games like all mario advance sm 2,3, world, yoshis island? Some music sound very bad, or street fighter 2 revival? Thanks!!

I don't know Disney Magical Quest so I can't answer, but I can assert Mega Man & Bass doesn't have them.

Yeah, the GBA can do it just fine technically, even if it requires sometimes throwing some CPU time at the task. Which apparently many developers were afraid of.

I don't know why developers were afraid of the GBA's CPU. Based on everything i've seen, the CPU was a staggering leap over the SNES. Developers should have had no trouble reproducing SNES music on the system as long as their code was efficient and reasonably well optimized, and you've provided evidence of that.

^This track heavily favors the SNES' instruments for the first 30 seconds, deeper and much cleaner bass, piano and horn. But once the higher pitched synthetic samples kick in around the 30 second mark, the GBA track gets interesting. Briefly at the 14 second mark and more prominently around 52 seconds in, there are high pitched synth samples that seem to have been added to the GBA track. I cannot hear them at all on SNES. They're a nice addition. So it's difficult to say which track is better overall, both versions have their advantages and disadvantages.

Indeed, MegaMan & Bass is a great example of how a SNES soundtrack could be updgraded while using the GBA hardware and still sound good/fresh/dynamic. Breath of Fire games had this handled poorly (and Final Fantasy advance series even more).

Indeed, MegaMan & Bass is a great example of how a SNES soundtrack could be updgraded while using the GBA hardware and still sound good/fresh/dynamic. Breath of Fire games had this handled poorly (and Final Fantasy advance series even more).

Megaman already lends itself well to an 8bit style, so that probably helps a lot. The 8bit rendition of MMX2's intro stage (from Xtreme 2 on GBC) sounds very cool for example-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLa4abfW6vc

Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire are fantasy RPGs and i'd say benefits from more orchestral music than Megaman.